[Tast­ing the Unique Cray­fish Cul­ture]

High­lights: A group of cray­fish con­nois­seurs from Wuhan City drove 180 kilo­me­ters just to sam­ple The Taste Fac­tory·Chux­i­awang Restau­rant’s del­i­ca­cies. The dozen peo­ple or­dered 22 plates of gar­lic cray­fish, glut­ting them­selves with the finest cray­fish in China.

In a mo­ment, the 22 dishes were fin­ished, but these food­ies still wanted more. They called the wait­ers: “Please give us 30 more orders to go.”

“Gar­lic cray­fish is our spe­cialty. Many cus­tomers come here for it and it has be­come more and more pop­u­lar. We have started mak­ing cus­tomers line up since mid-March.” In these words, we can feel how proud man­ager Zhang Jie is.

Her pride comes for a rea­son. Sum­mer hasn’t come yet, but it is hard to find a park­ing space in Qian­jiang’s ‘cray­fish city’ at 5 pm. The square is packed with cars from all over China. Many peo­ple come all the way from other prov­inces to sat­isfy their taste buds.

As the most fa­mous cray­fish brand in Qian­jiang City, The Taste Fac­tory·Chux­i­awang Restau­rant has be­come known all around the coun­try. There are now 61 fran­chised stores, lo­cated in Harbin, Zhuhai, and many other ci­ties. The golden sign of The Taste Fac­tory can be seen seem­ingly ev­ery­where now.

“Soon ten more restau­rants will be in busi­ness, and about seven stores are un­der ne­go­ti­a­tion,” said Zhang Jie. Born in Qian­jiang City, the high­light of The Taste Fac­tory is cray­fish—specif­i­cally the spe­cial gar­lic cray­fish. This dish has distin­guished The Taste Fac­tory and has helped the store suc­ceed in the fiercely com­pet­i­tive restau­rant in­dus­try. A sin­gle lo­ca­tion of The Taste Fac­tory·Chux­i­awang Restau­rant earned more than 30 mil­lion yuan in 2016, up about 10 mil­lion from 2015.

Nowa­days, “take the high-speed train in, eat some cray­fish, and tour Qian­jiang City” has be­come the new slo­gan that drives the eco­nomic devel­op­ment of Qian­jiang. Cray­fish have be­come the high­light of the city.

There are more than 2000 cray­fish restau­rants in Qian­jiang. Apart from The Taste Fac­tory, Xi­ahuang, Xiaoer Shangxia, and Xiaolizi are all fa­mous brands here. Dur­ing the May Day Hol­i­day of 2017, Xi­ahuang alone re­ceived 250 thou­sand guests from out­side Qian­jiang. The city was flooded with peo­ple crav­ing au­then­tic Qian­jiang cray­fish.

It is es­ti­mated that in the three days, more than 500 thou­sand kilo­grams of cray­fish were sold in Qian­jiang. The sales vol­ume of the food and ho­tel in­dus­try ex­ceeded 100 mil­lion yuan.

每一个驱车来潜江的饕餮客，远远地就能看到这个巨型小龙虾雕塑，看到它，也意味着离美食越来越近了。该雕塑高15米雕塑，长18米，重 100吨，历时8个月制造并安装。其通体红亮，活灵活现，以“张开双臂”造型寓“欢迎五湖四海来宾”之意。该雕塑于2015 年获得吉尼斯世界纪录，被认证为世界最大甲壳类动物雕塑。 Ev­ery foodie who drives miles of dis­tance to Qian­jiang for a nice feast of cray­fish can see from afar the gi­ant cray­fish statue. The sight of it means they are get­ting closer to the feast. It took eight months for work­ers to man­u­fac­ture and in­stall the statue 15 me­ters high, 18 me­ters long and 100 tons in weight. It vividly re­sem­bles a red and bright cray­fish which “open its arms” to “wel­come guests from all over the world.” The statue has been ac­knowl­edged by Guin­ness World Records 2015 as the world’s largest sculp­ture of crus­taceans.